


Satori in a Papercut

by Lex_Munro



Series: Stories From the Fateverse [5]
Category: Avengers (Comic), Iron Man (Comic), Marvel 616
Genre: Alternate Universe - Sci-fi, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Explicit Language, F/M, Genderswap, Hard Sci-fi, Het, Humor, Mental Disorder, Original Character(s), Rule 63, Technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-30
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-22 16:32:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 13,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lex_Munro/pseuds/Lex_Munro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A version of Anthony Stark grows up with a strange mental disorder that gives him visions of written information from across the multiverse.  It is this gift (and curse) that makes him the most brilliant technologist the Fate Network has ever seen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prodigal

**Author's Note:**

> Part of my Fateverse, a massive sci-fi Marvel multiverse. Set mostly in the Network Core at various times. Satori is the Japanese term for Buddhist enlightenment.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Years ago, the Cartographer met a brilliant boy named Anthony Stark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings:**   AU - Fateverse.  sci-fi with technobabble.  mention of mental illness.  language: pg-13 (for one use of g**damn).
> 
>  **pairing:**   none/gen (a little Tony/Steve bromance).
> 
>  **timeline:**   Network Operations 3621 (AD 6157).
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) one of the less-known meanings of "prodigal" is "in overabundant amount."  2) the Cartographer was mentioned in [On Attack](http://archiveofourown.org/works/238816/chapters/368032).  3) Six's mother (Maria) was a Network Theorist, and i have no idea how/when she died.  as you can see, his father (Howard) is a Network Engineer.  4) the brightness (and color) of light can be measured on the kelvin scale.  overhead daylight is around 6000 K (room temp is around 297 K).  5) yep.  resonant cryptographic schizophrenic hallucinations.
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Prodigal**

 

“—and now I’ve got the Savant breathing down my neck to get a more stable power source for some of the guns the Squad uses,” Howard is saying, hastily unlocking the door of his residence and leading the way toward his personal lab.  “Just because he blew off a hand while firing a weapon on an overcharge setting I specifically told him never to use.  It grew back, and he was in a different body four days later, so I don’t see how he has any latitude for complaint.”

Steven sympathizes.  He knows the Savant can be difficult to get along with.  He also knows next-to-nothing about engineering or armament design, so he assumes that what the Savant has asked is actually borderline unreasonable.

“I’m rambling,” Howard apologizes.  “Let’s just get you that prototype signal booster so you can—God damn it, Anthony!”

Steven nearly runs into Howard as the Engineer stops abruptly in the door of his lab.  He bites down on a reflexive urge to scold Howard for his language.

A very young man (still a boy, really) is sitting at a workbench and writing rapidly.  The floor is littered with papers, each one completely covered front-and-back with cramped writing and careful diagrams, over what looks like blueprints to several important devices.

“This was for a new air-recycler system!” Howard shouts, waving a fistful of defaced pages at the boy, who doesn’t seem to notice that he’s no longer alone in the room.  “If your mother were still alive, this sort of wanton disrespect for technical readouts would send her into cardiac arrest!”

Steven stoops to look at some of the other pages.  He spots phrases like ‘chronometric dampening’ and ‘hyperbolic chronogeometric triangulation’ and ‘sympathetic resonance mutability.’  “Howard,” he says, awed.  “Have you looked at these?”

“It’s just nonsense, it’s _always_ just nonsense,” Howard bites out as he tries to clear unsullied pieces of paper away from the boy (who is still writing).  “Just this disjointed mess of _nonsense_.  It seems like autism, like he’s been absorbing everything he sees and hears, and he just goes on little rampages like this, purging it all like a computer dumping its cache, but he won’t sit still for a diagnosis and his mother was emphatically against medicating children.”

Determined, Steven practically shoves a page in his friend’s face.  “Howard, _look_.  That’s high-level chronometric theory, things the Programmers and Theorists are still playing with.  Where would he just _hear_ that?  I _know_ Maria never took her work home; she was very careful about it.”

Howard reluctantly takes the paper and starts to read.  Slowly, the red flush of frustrated anger fades from his face.  “A-Anthony,” he says.  When the boy doesn’t answer, Howard takes the pen from him.

“Ah,” the boy says, looking at his hand.  “My pen’s gone.”

“Anthony,” Howard says again.

The boy turns to look at them, then looks somewhere else distractedly.

“Anthony, this is Steve.  He’s a Keeper.”

Anthony is staring fixedly at something.  “LF228-Omega,” he mumbles.  “Oh-three-three:  Cartographer.  Multi-Nodal scanning array.”

Steven blinks, taken aback.  “That’s right, Anthony.  What you wrote about on this piece of paper—it’s called chronometric theory.”

“Not theory.  Not.”  Anthony flinches, eyes moving along the ceiling.  “Posits.  Postulates.  Proofs.  Not theory.  It’s there, the math, it’s all…  Point-to-point without trigonometric calculation requires locational extrapolation based on dimensional mapping, aligning resonance wavelengths to induce pockets of Fidelis, instantaneous spatial interjuxtaposition, quantum tunneling, _tesseract_.”

“And that’s all very advanced,” Steven agrees.  “You can’t have learned that in the course of compulsory schooling.  Who taught you?  A Theorist?  Your mother?  Miss Oshima?”

Anthony squints at something high above Steven’s head.  “Doesn’t work because the light temperature is too low, but if we increase by two hundred Kelvin, the bombardment filter will catch monatomic contaminants and normalize.  Add bicarbonate injection during humidity control to speed odor dispersal, improve mood and productivity.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steven sees Howard scramble for a scribbled sheet and start squinting at it.  “He…he’s right,” Howard says, sounding stunned.  “It’s an improvement on the air-recycler I was in the middle of re-designing.”

While they watch, Anthony lists slightly to one side and traces something in the air with his finger.

“Anthony?” Steven says.  “What are you looking at?”

“Diagram.”

“For what?”

“Don’t know.  Five milliamps across eight point six nanometers to activate, reaction disruptable by plasma injection or quark destabilization.  Can I have that pen?  I was almost caught up.  I don’t want a backlog.  I hate backlog.  I can’t think when there’s backlog.  There’s too much.”

Steven looks at Howard.

“No!” the Engineer says petulantly, clutching his salvaged papers.  “Let me get some _blank_ paper.  Or a personal tablet and stylus.”

When Howard has left the lab, Anthony gets up and starts digging through drawers.

“Anthony, what are you doing?”

“Need to write, need to write,” the boy mutters, flicking through rulers and straightedges and protractors.  “My notebooks are full.  My pens are empty.  Need paper.  Need pen.  Dad has big paper, lots of paper.  I just need…a pen, I just…”

“Anthony, I’d like to show some of these to a Programmer.  Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Gravitic angle of interference,” Anthony tells him, gesturing to the bottom of the sheet in Steven’s hand.  “Fidelis Network Programmers.  Coding taskforce.  Artificial intelligence.  Artificial sapience—questionable ethical implications, questions of controllability, of volatility, of personality degradation and data corruption.  Software improvement.”

Steven tries to sort that out.  “Yes?” he hazards.

Anthony suddenly straightens.  “That’s it!  Personality inextricably tied to moral code, representable by series of priority arrays like decision-making web of Nodes, can be programmed with more intricately weighted system customizable per AI leading to AI that learns moral set applicable to its occupation.  Then the question of sentience features such as instinct or intuition, subliminal data interpretation possibly linked to Fidelis Effect, sensitive to leyline movement and resonance factors to…crap, crap, CRAP, I can’t see it!  _Need a pen_!”  And he dives back into the drawers with renewed urgency.

Steven is fascinated.  This is the youngest Tony Stark he’s ever met, talking so easily about things that stump some of the older ones.  He realizes abruptly that Howard has no idea how brilliant his son is, under this thick layer of—of whatever it is.

“Anthony, what’s…”  He doesn’t want to ask ‘what’s wrong with you,’ because he isn’t sure there _is_ something ‘wrong’ with Anthony.  “Do you know why you’re seeing these things?  What they are?”

“It’s,” Anthony says, yelping as he cuts his finger on the edge of a sheet of paper.  The blood wells up brightly, and he starts to move his hand, instinctively ready to stick his finger in his mouth.  He stops.  He stares at the fat red droplet.  Then he scrambles for paper and starts to write.

Steven moves without meaning to, an instinctive imperative of _child_ and _hurt_ and _protect_.  He catches the boy up in his arms, skinny little wrists trapped in his strong hands.  “Good Lord, Tony,” he gasps.

“Anthony,” the boy corrects.  “A-N-T-H-O-N-Y.”

“Anthony, _stop_.  You’re bleeding.”

“No, no, I have to,” Anthony insists, twisting like a snake and almost getting free.  “This is good, this is fine, this way I don’t need a pen.”

“Anthony, look at me.”

Slowly, Anthony stills, staring.  “Hi,” he says, like he’s only now seeing Steven.

“Hi,” Steven replies, worried and exasperated but smiling.  “You can write it down later, okay?  I promise.  Just wait a little longer.  Just let me put a bandage on your cut, and then I’ll find you a pen and you can write all you want with _that_.”

“Hallucinations,” Anthony tells him.  “Visual hallucinations.  Sometimes printed like on a monitor.  Sometimes handwritten.  The frequency makes me think it’s schizophrenia.  Some of it’s true.  Some of it’s fiction.  Some of it’s science.  By now I can usually tell when it’s just something made-up.  It’s like…my brain is the epicenter of a powerful Fidelis Effect.  Collecting things that are written down.  And they stack up, like snowflakes, until I can’t see and I can’t think and I can’t breathe.  But if I write them down, they vanish.  They go away, and I don’t see them again unless I concentrate.”

And Steven doesn’t know what to do with all that, with a fourteen-year-old self-diagnosing a debilitating mental illness.  So he just rubs Anthony’s bony little arms and nods and says, “Okay.  Okay, Anthony.  Just let me fix up your finger, and I promise I’ll go get you a pen.”

He finds the first aid kit and tends Anthony’s paper cut in silence.

By the time he finishes, Howard gets back with a tablet, flicks it on and quickly opens a word processor before handing it to Anthony, who sits abruptly on the floor and starts writing again.

“What happened?” Howard asks.

“Paper cut,” Steven says numbly.  “Howard, you need to send the boy through the Academy.  Give him a pseudo-pen so he can write out whatever happens to be crowding his thoughts, let him get some more formal education to fill in the cracks.  We _need_ Programmers.”

“Don’t tell me like I don’t know,” Howard snaps.  “It’s been hundreds of years since we found someone who could do it, and before that we only had what we started with _thousands_ of years ago.  I’ll put him in the Underprogrammer curriculum.  Here, the signal booster.”  He goes to a workbench and plucks up a coin-sized little prototype device, which he hands to Steven.

“Thank you.  Good night.”

With an urgent sound of padding bare feet, Anthony jumps up and grasps Steven’s sleeve.  “Are you going?”

“I’ll see you again,” Steven tells him.  “I promise.”

“I believe you,” Anthony replies, and sits back down.

 

**.End.**


	2. Fairy Godmother

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was Programmer 005 who made sure that Anthony's work was seen before he even finished his Programmer training.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> because, as much as he annoys her, Five actually likes Six.
> 
>  **warnings:**   AU - Fateverse.  sci-fi with technobabble.  OC: Programmer 005.  language: pg-13 (for f***, s***, and g**damn).
> 
>  **pairing:**   none/gen.
> 
>  **timeline:**   NO 3621 (AD 6157), a few months after **Prodigal**.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) Five's name is Mizutaki Oshima.  she wears glasses for vision correction; they also happen to be programmable to work as the visual peripheral of a computer system.  2) Five (and the person on whom i based her) is perfectly capable of holding a lengthy conversation with absolutely no swearing.  the moment you point this out, she'll absent-mindedly start to swear again.  3) "comp-ed" = "compulsory education."
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Fairy Godmother**

 

Mizutaki ignores Underprogrammers as a general rule.  They’re usually sloppy, pig-headed morons, uncreative as they are inelegant.  Occasionally, one will start to get clever, will try to write code using tricks and shortcuts and backdoors.  The result is almost always that something breaks, or something that no one else can use.

They’re numbers.  An army of stupid, insipid numbers that crunch like calculators and don’t give two shits about computerized sentience, about rudimentary AI, about data interpretation, about timestream theory or chronogeometry.

Except this one.

The Cartographer told her to keep an eye on him.

The son of an Engineer and a Theorist.  The son of Maria Stark, whom Mizutaki liked.

 _Miss Oshima, I think you should watch this one_ , he said.

So she watches the kid.  He’s all mussed hair and knobby knees and constant absent-minded writing.

And after watching him for an hour, she walks up to where he sits at a table in one of the Academy study halls.

“You’re Anthony,” she says by way of introduction.

He writes a little more, stops, looks at her.  “Yes.”

“I’m Mizutaki.  Programmer 005.  You can call me Five.  I knew your mother.”

His eyes wander to the side.  “Oshima.  Drafted to full Programmer status before you finished Academy courses because your instructor happened across an AI you wrote as a joke.”

She nods.  “That AI was turned into a companion-AI, marketed in disgustingly adorable little stuffed toys for children.”

“It’s good,” he tells her.  “But you could’ve done so much more with it.”

“I could’ve.  But then I would’ve had to worry about ethical implications.”

He leans toward her, eyes alight with interest.  “Have you given much thought to them?  The ethical implications, I mean.  I’ve been thinking for so long about the way human consciousness and conscience are structured, and about streamlining the decision tree to form a moral compass, because of course you need a moral compass if you’re going to have independent decision-making, and who’s to say that there wouldn’t come a point when some of our field agents need the backup of a semi-autonomous, self-reliant piece of equipment, right?”

It’s cute, this puppy-like eagerness, this genuine fascination with their field of work.  Only Three has this kind of energy, only Two has this level of interest.  This is why the Cartographer told her to keep an eye on the kid.  Train him up right, draw attention to the appropriate projects, and he’ll be a Programmer in no time.

“Can you show me some of the code you might use to implement this new kind of decision-making?” she asks him.

“Sure, sure!” he says, tapping his pseudo-pen on the personal tablet in front of him.

Two buttons later, she’s watching him write, code scrolling through her glasses as he talks about beautiful, exciting things like ‘fluid priority cascades’ and ‘trainable decision trees.’  His code is good, but poorly spaced, like he just writes it out in a stream and never reads it.

“Steve said you swear a lot,” Anthony says abruptly.  “But you haven’t sworn at all.”

The non-sequitor startles a laugh out of her.  “Kid, I cuss like a sailor most of the time.  Hell, three out of every four words that come out of my mouth around Underprogrammers is something that’d get bleeped by a censor program.  I took it easy around your mom, though, and I guess that just automatically carried over to you.  If it makes you uncomfortable to be treated differently, I can throw in a little more profanity.”

His mouth twists for a moment.  “If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable to change your habits…” he offers.

She grins at him, but doesn’t answer.  “Have you read the Savant’s thesis on timeline absorption?”

“I started to, but my instructor told me to put it away and pay attention.”

Mizutaki laughs again.  “Stodgy old fucker.  You should finish reading it.  The Savant’s fucking brilliant when it comes to complex chronogeometry.  I mean, all Wades are smart in a kind of dumb, disconnected, accidental way, but _he’s_ a goddamn _genius_.  It’s amazing talking to him.  Tellya what—you finish reading his thesis, tell me what you thought of it, and if you liked it, I’ll see if I can get him to drop by for a chat.”

“Isn’t he busy?”

“He has to be dragged kicking and screaming away from his work,” she snorts.  “He needs the downtime, and he loves talking about timestream theory.  He and your mom and I could talk for hours and hours about shape-matching and the minute alterations of resonance that signal certain events.  We’ve been trying to understand his intuition.”

“Oh?”  Anthony looks nonplussed.

Mizutaki stares at him.  “They must not teach you kids jack shit about Network history in comp-ed!” she declares.  “The reason he’s called the Savant is that he has completely unerring intuition for about three or four months ahead in any timeline.  We send him off with a briefing that explains whose body he’ll land in and who’s likely to try and kill him, and that’s all he needs to figure out exactly how to demolish the timeline in under two months.  He’s fucking _amazing_.”

Anthony squints at something to his right.  “Complex inter-object chronometric resonance receptivity, clairvoyance, precognition, ESP, psychic signature interpretation.”

“Yeah, that kinda stuff.  Anyhoo, it’s hard as hell for him to find people who can keep up with him when he talks about some of the more esoteric aspects of timestream theory, and since your—they’re hallucinations, is that right?”  At his nod, she goes on.  “Since your hallucinations fill you in most of the time when you don’t understand what’s being said, you shouldn’t have a bit of trouble.  Think of it as doing him a favor.”

“Hm.”  Anthony slowly turns his head to the left, as though following something.  “Let’s get ice cream.  I’ll finish reading while we eat.”

“Kid, you just said four of my favorite words in sequence:  let’s get ice cream.  It’s a verifiable fact that I’m eighty-seven percent more amenable to any suggestion placed after that phrase.”

 

 **.End.**


	3. Sysadmin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shortly after Natalie Summers discovered several missing Nodes, Stephanie Rogers goes to her fiancé to find more information about the situation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings:**   AU - Fateverse.  sci-fi.  technobabble.  a little Rule 63 for flavor.  rampant bad 616 references.  het, sort of (if it were Earth-616, it'd be slash XD).  language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s*** and g**damn).
> 
>  **pairing:**   Steph/Tony.
> 
>  **timeline:**   a few minutes after Stephanie tells Nat and the gang what's up with the Traveler.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   i doesn't owns the movies or the characters.  or the assorted objects of pop culture reference.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) of course, you know by now that Analyst 043 (Stephanie Rogers) is a fem!Cap.  Anthony is a little more unhinged than most multiverse incarnations of Tony Stark, but certainly no less brilliant.  Pietro gets to be Head Analyst because he's speedy.  and a badass.  2) i think it's pretty funny that Steph dismisses most of what Anthony says as conspiracy-theory-nonsense. she's got a heavy case of reality-denial. XD  3) the Core monitoring room is probably not lit (or only dimly lit), so that the analysts can see every tiny detail of the sims (which are made of three-dimensional light projections).  not a big problem for them, since their keyboards/menus/etc. exist virtually.
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Sysadmin**

 

In her younger days, Analyst 043 thought she loved her work.

She tested very high in chronometric resonance and pattern recognition, was placed in Data Analysis the day after she finished secondary schooling, and swiftly rose in the ranks.  She had an unrivalled record for identification and resolution of stability issues.

It was something she was good at, something that made a difference, something that made the multiverse a better and safer place.  They promoted her to Senior Analyst, gave her the coveted job of watching over the MP bundle—a bundle absolutely critical to the stability of the timestream, but in almost constant flux.  It required careful attention and swift reaction.  The only position more prestigious and demanding in the department was that of Head Analyst (there were two, working in alternating six-hour shifts with relief by an understudy), and that invariably went to individuals with speed-enhancing mutations. 

It was in her role as a Senior Analyst that she met her fiancé, Anthony (Programmer 006), and discovered that her love for her work was _nothing_ compared to his.

Anthony lives and breathes his work.  No matter what his body is doing at the time, part of his mind is always working.  He wakes in the night to write snippets of code.  He scribbles blueprints in the air during conversations.  He has been designing, updating, and maintaining Nodes for most of his life.  He is a genius, a prodigy, a phenom.  The simple act of writing a recycling process brings him enough joy and satisfaction to keep him ebullient for weeks.

And his joy distracted her.

Her thoughts at work began to stray, her attention focused on the timeclock and how soon she would get to see him again.

And Analyst 043, Stephanie Rogers, the most distinguished, decorated, and admired Data Analyst in the entire Network, was caught asleep at the wheel.

Wars have a distinct shape in the threads of the timestream, and while that shape may form at different rates, it should be instantly recognizable to any Analyst worthy of the job.  But it was not until branches with resonant similarity manifested the event that she noticed it in the primary bundle, and by then it was too late—an absurd superhero civil war had nearly sent the entire timestream crashing down.

At least three other primary bundles suffered a catastrophic influx of chronometric entropy.  It took fifteen Network Agents more than a month to stabilize them, and the Auditor himself had to pull multiple subjects into her primary bundle to replace critical loci.  The cost in man-hours was nothing compared to the cost of replacing those high-resonance subjects without arousing the suspicion of the timeline’s native inhabitants.

Disgraced, Stephanie was brought before the Network Operations Concordat and the Sysadmin.  She was stripped of the rank of Senior Analyst and charged with unforgivable negligence.  They gave her back her old segment, returning Earth-616 to its previous caretaker (who had to be pulled out of retirement).  Further such incidents would result in her exile from the Network Core and its environs.

Since that day, Stephanie has forced herself to develop the ability to split her life in halves.  One half of her life is her work, and she obsessively traces every anomaly, flooding the Core with a million tiny pieces of bureaucratic nonsense (permission slips, report forms, trace requests, datareads, missing subject designations, agent traces, node traces, on and on and on).  The other half of her life is Anthony, because he is far too _amazing_ for her to ever even try to give him up.

Because she wants to keep the first half from falling apart, she is willing to risk coming across as a cold workaholic in parts of the second.  Anthony hardly even notices, but she still hates doing it.

“Tony.”

“Mm-hm?” he says, still engrossed in whatever he’s working on.

“You’re aware we’re under alert status?”

“Mm-hm.”

“You’ve heard Nat discovered that we had sixteen Nodes missing?”

He flicks something with his left hand, and a list flashes into existence before her eyes.  “Makes the total twenty-three.  But I found Oracle, and we’re already regrowing her Keeper.”

Stephanie waves the list away (the room’s projector accepts her dismissal with a brief flicker of something like offense).  “How long have you known?”

He pauses, looks at the ceiling, makes calculations under his breath.  “A wwwweek?  I think?  What day is it?”

Impatiently, Stephanie looks at her chron.  “Friday.  Core Standard Eight-Oh-Eight-Five-One.”

Anthony pauses again.  “Five One?”

How he could have lost track of the _year_ , she will never understand, but she huffs and answers.  “Yes, Tony, Network Operations thirty-six-fifty-one, the same as it’s been since _January_.”

He shrugs the information away and returns to his puttering.  “A week, then.  The pattern on the feeds is distinct, it’s got the minor carrier byte on the end that tells you the transmission is being made by an unauthorized physical-contact user.  I added that more than a decade back, thought you data-bunnies knew what to look for by now.”

She resists the urge to throw something at him (after all, he is an inventor of sorts, and there really is no telling what brilliant new object she might break).  “We are not ‘data-bunnies.’  And we don’t view the feeds directly, you know that.  We view the simulations.”

That seems to surprise him.  He fumbles a tool and juggles it from hand to hand for a moment to keep it from hitting the ground.  Slowly, he turns to face her.  “Steph.  When’d you get here?”

“Tony, I’ve been standing here talking to you for five minutes.  My shift’s been up for fifteen, and so has yours.”

“That was you?  Huh.”  He reaches out and scribbles something in midair with his datapen.  “They don’t view the feeds directly anymore…  Definitely have to amplify that little checksum so you data-bunnies can see it on the sims.”

“Tony, for the last time…We. Are. Not. Data-bunnies.  The word is _analyst_.  I am an _analyst_ , and I am a _consummate professional_ , and I take offense at the grotesquely outdated objectification of my gender.”

“That’s ageist,” he snorts.  “Some of us are old enough to remember a time when the objectification of women wasn’t outdated.  And not all analysts are female, so I think it’s pretty sexist of you to assume the term ‘data-bunny’ is sexually objectifying rather than occupationally objectifying.”

“I don’t have time for this,” she growls.

“Oh?” he says blithely.  “Wasn’t your shift up?”

“I want to find out what’s causing all this trouble, so that I can make sure nothing happens to _my_ segment.”

Anthony stands and tucks his datapen into his pocket.  “You’re still bent out of shape over missing that little war?”

“Tony, that ‘little war’ almost leveled three bundles.  The Concordat took it pretty seriously, so of course I’m going to take it seriously myself.”

He leads the way out of his lab, locks it with a quick thumb-scan.  “The Concordat’s full of idiots, Steph.  You’d be surprised what kinda shit the stream can recover from.  How the hell do you think it managed to survive this long with all the meta-humans and super-whatsits flying around doing whatever the hell they want?  It’s pretty damn naïve to think a civil war’s any worse than the day-to-day good-guys-versus-bad-guys scraps they get into.  Like I keep saying, that’s gotta be why we have Wades.  The timestream grew them as some weird self-defense mechanism.”

Stephanie objects to his rough language, but she knows better than to waste her time trying to scold him when he is walking quickly and purposefully—he will lose his train of thought, and they will inevitably end up lost.  “Tony, don’t start again on your sentient-timestream theory.  I could’ve lost my job.  They almost exiled me.”

“Morons!” Anthony mutters.  He scans them onto a restricted lift, where he hits coordinates she vaguely recognizes.

“Look, Tony, the Sysadmin signed off on—”

“The _Sysadmin_?” he cries, grabbing her arms and shaking her.  “Steph, has anyone actually _seen_ the Sysadmin in—in _fifty years_?”

“O-of course they have,” she stammers, startled.  “He was at my hearing—”

“But did he speak?  Did anyone touch him?”

“Well, _no_ , it’s the _Sysadmin_ , of course no one touched him.”

Anthony lets her go and stalks around the lift.  “How do we know it’s even him?  How do we know they haven’t replaced him with a—a _puppet_?  How do we know he ever existed in the first place?”

“Because the Network Core didn’t make itself,” Stephanie replies sharply.

“Didn’t it?”

She gapes.  Her technical knowledge of timestream theory is not complete enough to let her answer with certainty.  At length, she shakes her head.  “Another part of your sentient-timestream stuff, huh?  What does it even matter?  The Network is here, and it operates.”

“And if it ever _stops_ operating?  What then?”

Stephanie draws a deep breath.  “Anthony, what on _earth_ are you saying?  You’re a Programmer; it’s _your_ job to make sure the Network doesn’t stop operating.  And where are you taking me?”

When the lift hums to a stop, he seizes her wrist and drags her along a familiar corridor.  “We’re going to the Core monitoring center,” he says.  “We’re going to stare at the synergistic feed until we find the cause of this little hiccup, and then we’ll send it to the Keepers to get it all sorted out.”

He scans them through a huge black door and into a room shaped like a gigantic cylinder.

The center holds an enormous projection of a timestream monitoring simulation.  In a ring around the base of the simulation, the shift’s Senior Analysts are tapped into their own, smaller-scale simulations.

The sight of it brings tears of shame and awe to her eyes.  She _had this_.  The ebb and flow of probability and possibility was at her fingertips, and she chose—

Stephanie watches her fiancé scamper to one of the hover-platforms that are used to ascend the Core Tower.  He waves her over, so she steps onto it with him, and they rise together to the upper heights.

On a mobile control rig, the Head Analyst cruises sedately around and through the main projection a few meters below the point-oh.

“Pietro, need a big favor,” Anthony calls.

The white-haired man marks a branch of the projection and sighs.  “Anthony, your ‘big favors’ invariably cost me exhaustive amounts of man-hours.”

“Great.  Pull up the Nodes.”

“Since you can never make my job easy, I’m going to assume you mean all of them.”  He waves a hand, and blue threads glow brightly all around the projection; he points to a thick rope of them.  “There’s our trouble, right there.”

Stephanie stares at the knot as it lashes out this way and that, pushing and pulling at the bundles it touches.

“Send those coordinates to Forecaster,” Anthony says.

The Head Analyst sighs again.  “You know it hasn’t been cleared with the Concordat yet—”

Anthony just pulls the datapen back out of his pocket.  “Okay, I’ll do it.”  And he starts to scribble away on the air.

Red text flashes warnings across the central projection, but he silences all of it with an absent flick.

“God _damn_ you, Anthony Stark,” growls the Head Analyst.

“I sure hope so.”

“They’ll hang you out to dry for this one!”

“Oh, but then they’d have to replace me.”

“Tony,” Stephanie says urgently.

“You know, while we’re here, let’s ask for the Central Database entry on Keeper 001.”

The motion of the datapen is hypnotic, like a conductor’s baton and a calligrapher’s brush rolled into one.  Stephanie just _knows_ that something awful is about to happen, but she cannot look away.  “ _Tony_ ,” she hisses again.

Several things happen at once.

An alarm goes off, people start shouting, huge blast doors clang into place.

Stephanie cannot hear over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears.

The central projection traces a ribbon of bright blue near the densely packed middle, where the primary bundles reside.  Then the simulation vanishes, and projected words replace it in the darkness.

**you found me.**

Stephanie just clutches Anthony’s sleeve and stares.

“Huh,” says Anthony, in a tone of aloof bemusement.

And sound rushes back into the world as more alarms sound and the Senior Analysts start shrieking that they have lost all monitoring simulations and all central processes.

“Uh.  Hi.”

**hello. =)**

“We, uh,” Anthony tries, and has to clear his throat to continue.  “We didn’t mean to interrupt.”

**that’s okay, i was bored.  is it your turn to hide now?**

“Nnnno.  We kind of need you to go back to what you were doing.”

**oh. =(**

“Carry on.”

**thanks, i guess.  bye?**

“Yeah.  Bye.”

The text flickers out, and the simulation retraces itself, lighting the room once more.

“What just happened?” Stephanie mumbles, still clutching Anthony’s sleeve.

“Unless I’m very much mistaken, my dear, I think we just met both Keeper 001 and Node 001.  The _real_ Sysadmin.”

“You’re both under arrest,” says the Head Analyst.

 

**.End.**


	4. Knots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anthony Stark has just been arrested for the first time, and is going just a little bit insane. The Cartographer comes to bail him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **warnings:**   AU - Fateverse.  sci-fi.  technobabble.  a little Rule 63 for flavor.  rampant bad 616 references.  het, sort of.  language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).
> 
>  **pairing:**   Steph/Tony, with a side order of some Steve/Tony bromance.
> 
>  **timeline:**   fifteen minutes after being arrested in the Core Monitoring chamber in **Sysadmin**.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   Marvel owns the characters, I just own the au and au versions.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) Analyst 043 (Stephanie Rogers) is a fem!Cap.  Anthony is a little more unhinged than most multiverse incarnations of Tony Stark, but certainly no less brilliant.  2) 'deep' = 'datapen' (from 'DP').  see entry in the **Fateverse Glossary**.  3) there's Stephanie's huge case of reality-denial again.  notice Steve doesn't really say anything; he's probably thinking some very disparaging things about her.  one of my readers pointed out that Steph seems to think her fiancé's debilitating mental disorder is just some kind of 'eccentricity.'  4) the Network Concordat's chamber is probably another room that makes heavy use of their projector, so i'm sure it's usually dimly lit.  5) hey, look, Tony's conspiracy theories aren't looking so far-fetched now, are they?  Stephanie's probably still in complete denial.  6) by 'she,' the Sysadmin means the Database Administrator.
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Knots**

 

Anthony is experiencing a moment of panic.  This has rarely ever happened, and never since he was given his position as Head Programmer (and the beautiful little object that has become as indispensable to him as air).

This is the first time he has ever been arrested, and when they put him into the cell, they took the only thing that keeps him from going mad.  For more than a decade, he has had it by his side night and day.

His mind feels crowded, cluttered, tangled up in knots.  He sits for a moment on the bench provided, feet jogging nervously.  Then he stands and paces.  Then he wrings his hands and sits again, palms itching.

“Tony, _please_ ,” Stephanie groans, massaging her temples.

He rushes up to the force barrier across the doorway.  “I really, _really_ need that datapen back!” he calls to the warder.  “Please, I’m—I’m a Head Programmer, Programmer 006, I _need_ that datapen, I’m losing things as we speak—there, just talking to you, I just completely forgot a tweak to the food-synthesis system.  I have to write things down, I have to have my datapen!”

“I’m sorry, Programmer,” the warder replies.  “But I’m smart enough to know that if you had a datapen, you’d be out of that cell in two seconds.”

“Or less,” Anthony compulsively corrects with a grimace.  “But, please, if I just promise to stay put—you could use a rope or something, tie me to a chair, just give me back my datapen.  Agh—improved waste management algorithm, needpennow!”

The warder gives him a sympathetic look.  “I’m afraid we’ll have to suffer a productivity drop until a Keeper or an enforcer of the Netcon comes to get you.”

Anthony whines as the algorithm slips away.  “No, no, there it goes, aw, _shit_.  Literally.”

“Tony,” Stephanie scolds.

“Crap.  Literally.  Sure, it’ll be back, but that could be weeks.  Can I at least have a pencil, or a piece of chalk, or—or _something_?  Fast?  Like, _now_ , because a Node script just drifted in, and I’ve really got to write it down…”

On the bench behind him, Stephanie sighs.  “Tony, please sit down and have your nervous breakdown quietly, like a big boy.”

“Nonono, there it went, _dammit_!  Look, warder—no, I can’t do that, I need a name, what’s your name?”

“Virgil,” the guy says with a trace of an amused grin.    “Virgil Bowman, Warder 5214.”

“Good, great—Virgil, do you understand what is happening right now?  As we speak, I am _hemorrhaging code_.  Do you know what that word means, ‘hemorrhaging’?”

“I am not an imbecile, sir,” Virgil remarks, no longer quite so amused.  “There’s no need to speak to me like I am.”

Anthony thumps his forehead against the force barrier (the brief jolt clears ideas from his head, makes the numbers stop for a few seconds before they crowd in more and faster).  “Yyyeah, I know, yikes.  Virgil-who-is-not-an-imbecile-and-should-not-be-spoken-to-as-if-he-were, you have to understand that I’m a little obsessive-compulsive about this, actually it’s more like resonant cryptographic schizophrenic hallucinations, but _anyway_ , I _have to code_ , I just do, I have to.  You have to eat and sleep and breathe, I have to get this stuff in my head on paper.”

“Or it’s the end of the multiverse as we know it?” Virgil asks in a bored tone.

Anthony growls as the stream of numbers and letters stutters back to life in his mind.  “No, or it all starts to jumble together and get clogged and I can’t _think_ , and _then_ the multiverse might come to an end.  Coincidentally, it led to the refreshingly watery flavor to the air you’re breathing right now, and the fact that flushing the toilets generates the power that keeps our streets clean.  Oh, and, hah—you’ll like this one—it’s the reason we have Smart Nodes and the Smart Node Laws.”  He realizes that he is getting unfairly irate with a man who is only doing his job.  “Sorry, sorry,” he babbles.  He wonders whether it would be worth Stephanie’s shouting to bite his finger so he can use his blood to write on the walls.

A door hisses open, and Virgil glances toward it.  “Well, fortunately, your superiority complex isn’t my problem anymore.”

“Where’s the deep?” the newcomer asks, and it takes Anthony a moment to recognize the voice with all the ideas screaming through his brain.

“Steve!” he yips, and accidentally smacks his head on the barrier when he leans to look.  Again, the comforting blankness comes, but he knows intellectually that he has just done something unforgivable, has just lost the thread of several little seeds of brilliance.

And then the barrier falls, and the Cartographer gives him back his datapen, and he hastily switches it on and sits on the floor to write.  Organizing it is not something he concerns himself with; that is a task reserved for Underprogrammers.  He only concerns himself with the flow, with shutting up some of the voices so he can hear himself think.

When it tapers off a bit, he spares some attention to gesture between his two blond companions.  “Steve, Steph; Steph, Steve.  _Steve_ —have you ever had a realization that was appallingly awful but also kinda insanely cool?”

The Cartographer sits on the bench next to Stephanie with a polite nod of greeting.  “No, but Tony Starks get them all the time,” he says.  “Because unlike Reed Richardses, they have the foresight to see all the horrible implications brought on by human nature.”

“Thanks, I think,” Anthony mutters while he draws a circuit diagram.  “Back to the point—realization, big realization, really bad but really neat— _it’s alive_.”

“What is?”

“The Core.”

Steve’s feet shift in a way that indicates he is leaning closer (Anthony cannot be bothered to glance up again and see for himself).  “The Central Processing Core of the Fidelis-473 Timestream Maintenance Network.  Is alive?”

“Aware, awake, sentient, reasoning, _yes_ ,” Anthony replies, jerking his datapen to the side to start making an unrelated note.  “Node 001 is its own Keeper.  The thing I’ve been trying to do for thirty years has already been done, was done thirty-seven _hundred_ years ago.”

Steve’s feet stretch forward again; he has leaned back against the wall.  “Well, that’s…vaguely unsettling.”

“I thought so, too, but he didn’t really seem to mind, in the fifteen seconds or so that we talked.”

“No, Tony, not the part about using someone’s mind as an inexhaustible work-horse to maintain the timestream’s stability—though God knows that’s pretty bad—I mean the fact that there’s a reason we give Nodes Keepers instead of just sticking them in semi-autonomous robotic shells or something.”

Anthony sits up and blinks.  Then he starts to draw furiously, copying down an elaborate blueprint for a semi-autonomous robotic shell.  “And I’m thinking he doesn’t have just a _semblance_ of consciousness like my Smart Nodes, I’m thinking he _is_ consciousness, fully-integrated, and that, dear Steven, is the very essence of brilliance, and do you know _why_?”

“Because after you know enough versions of Reed, you start to think the definition of ‘brilliance’ is ‘accidentally creating an intra-dimensional portal device while trying to come up with a superior shower curtain’?”

Stephanie snorts.  “Because humans have instinct, intuition, and _conscience_.  The only conscience the Nodes have is hard-programming that tells them what they can and can’t do, and an elaborate priority-web that lets them make choices when caught at a morally ambiguous crossroads.  Stark’s First Theory of Complex AI.”

Anthony writes down something about hand-held portal devices and cake without understanding why.  “You remember that?”

“Tony, your AI theories are part of how I can spot incoming stability issues.  Know the Node, and you’ll know what it _definitely won’t_ do.”

He beams at her for just a moment.  “Knew there was a reason I love you.”  He stops writing when the knot of ideas has been untangled, tucks his datapen in his pocket.  “Those theories are the reason AI are easier to deal with than most people.”

Steve is indeed leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed.  “So.  The reason you were arrested and I got called up right as I was sitting down to dinner…?”

“Pietro’s a dick?”

“Tony!”

He flinches.  “It is _so weird_ to get that in stereo.  I made contact with the Core.  With Sysadmin.  Not sure if we were arrested because of some sort of hush-hush secret conspiracy, or because I hacked deep into the Red Branches to find him.”

Stephanie groans.  “Tony, knock it off with the conspiracy theories, just for today.  I can’t take it anymore.”

Steve gives her a sidelong glance.  “Anyway, Tony, I’m here to take you both before the Netcon for debrief.”

“Oh,” Anthony says, blinking.  “Okay.”

He lets the Cartographer lead the way out of the detention block, onto one of the central lifts, all the way up to the top of the Tower.  At the top, thirteen men and women wait around a semicircular table on a raised dais.

One of the Concordat members snorts.  “Anthony Stark.  Why am I not surprised?”

Anthony gestures to the door.  “Probably because of the Schrödinger-dread interaction, which about half of the time produces a reduced-entropy resonant para—”

“Be silent.  The question was rhetorical.”

Silent?  He can do that.

He pulls out his datapen and hits the button that makes his programming live, starts doodling his way through backdoor code until the room’s main projector sparks to life.

“Tony,” Steph hisses, and kicks his ankle.

Another member of the Netcon makes a disgusted sound.  “I hardly think an arrest hearing is the appropriate arena for such antics, Stark!”

He writes, and his (admittedly messy) writing appears on the projected image.

 _-You told me to be silent.  I’ll be silent.  But you’re not going to stop me from defending my actions.-_

“Juvenile,” someone mutters.

Someone else shakes his head.  “No, he has a point.  Head Programmers are prone to taking things literally; it’s best to be careful of our wording, especially when admonishing them.  He is himself so fantastically prolific that we cannot afford to unintentionally stifle a particular train of thought.”

“Are you suggesting that we humor him?  That we pander to this ridiculous adolescent behavior?”

“Not at all, simpl—”

The room falls silent.

The hacked projection still shows Anthony’s words from earlier, followed by a typed line.

 **i found you! XD**

Anthony writes fast, still mindful of the Netcon’s order of silence.

 _-Yes, you did.  Please don’t go hide; we need to talk to you.-_

The pixels, tiny visible collisions of light, scramble and ripple for a moment.

 **…?…**

Two seconds’ pause.

 **did i do something wrong? ó_ò**

“Not ‘wrong,’ per se,” one of the Netcon ventures.  “Er—can it—he—hear us?”

 **i can hear.  but i remember people only ever want to talk to me when i do something wrong. =(**

Anthony holds up his free hand to forestall further questions for a moment, writes with his other hand.

 _-Did the Network experience any downtime when I found you earlier?-_

Again, the projection scrambles as if in confusion.

 **…?  no, i was awake the whole time.  sorry if i missed something, but i just get so bored lately. =_=**

“How ‘lately’ is ‘lately’?” someone sputters.

 **sometime in greb…400 years?  didn’t mark, sorry. =\**

“Are you—you _are_ the Sysadmin, aren’t you?” asks someone else.

 **yes?**

The central member of the Netcon leaps to his feet.  “Don’t you know?!”

 **no?**

Anthony knows how to settle this; he scribbles out a command.

 _-Request dataread from Central Database:  Keeper 001.-_

The projection turns scarlet, and a discordant beep sounds.

 **can’t. =(**

The Netcon mutters and mumbles.

 **i don’t remember and she won’t give me the file.  i even called her a big fat meanie-head.  wait, are we here because _you’re_ in trouble? D=**

For a while, Anthony waves his hand, trying to decide what he will say.

 _-I’m not sure.  They arrested me.-_

A pause, a flicker.

 **> =C**

“That seems potentially bad,” Steve notes dully.

“Upsetting the entity responsible for our entire way of life?” Stephanie scoffs.  “Yes, ‘potentially bad’ just about covers it.”

 **un-arrest my new friend.  now.  before i reroute all transmissions to the database and go play about a thousand concurrent games of high-stakes online poker.**

After another five seconds of slightly stunned silence, the Network Concordat dissolves into whispered argument again.

“Did—”

“Is he—”

“Seriously—”

“Yes,” the Cartographer says loudly.  “The Sysadmin is threatening to go on strike.”

An idea tickles at the edge of Anthony’s thoughts, and he briefly turns aside to scribble it in the air.

“All right,” sighs the central Netcon member.  “Programmer 006, Analyst 043, you are hereby released, with the understanding that you are not to mention the status of the Sysadmin or the original reasons for your arrest, and you are to refrain from any and all actions that interfere with the proper and consistent operation of the Network Core.  Does the Concordat approve this course of action?”

“Affirmative,” the other twelve chorus.

“Is this decision acceptable to the Sysadmin?”

The projection wavers, swirls into a vortex of pixels.

 **yeah, sure.**

Collectively, the Network Concordat breathes a sigh of relief.

 **for now. >=P**

“What have you gotten me into?” Stephanie mumbles.

 

 **.End.**


	5. Regression

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shortly after sending the Traveler and the Savant back to their respective homes, Anthony confronts Programmer 002 about the fact that the System Administrator has the attention span of a goldfish and can't even remember his own name.  Then Anthony and Programmer 004 have a fundamental disagreement about Wades and the nature of happiness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set right after [Singularity](http://archiveofourown.org/works/238816/chapters/368149) and [Artifacts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/238745/chapters/366509).
> 
>  **warnings:**   Fateverse.  sci-fi/technobabble.  a little background Rule 63.  language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus  f***).
> 
>  **pairing:**   none/gen. minor reference to Steph/Tony.
> 
>  **timeline:**   shortly after **Artifacts** , in the restricted lower levels of the Core Tower.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   marvel owns all base characters, but i created the AU and various AU versions of the characters.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) now you the programmers. One = Dr. Jack Hammer (Weasel), Two = Dr. Reed Richards, Three = Forge, Four = Hope, Five = Mizutaki Oshima (OFC), and Six = Anthony Stark.  they all have entries in [The Fateverse Appendix](http://lex-munro.livejournal.com/64565.html).  2) this is probably the first time anyone's mentioned the Sysadmin's original identity to Anthony.  3) the Core Tower is separated into six equal Sectors and more than five hundred Levels (a hundred and fifty of which are below ground).  the ten lowest levels are heavily shielded and highly secure--only Programmers, Engineers, and members of the Netcon can enter these levels, and only a Programmer can open the doors to the isolation libraries, which grant direct access to system-critical data.  4) everybody has something they get worked up about.  for Stephanie, that's apparently "young people these days," lol.  for Hope, it's protecting the happy ignorance of the vast majority of Wades (in spite of the fact that most of them probably *would* prefer to know the truth).
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Regression**

 

Anthony stares at Reed.

For someone who has just admitted to knowing the truth behind the Network’s greatest secrets, the older Programmer seems remarkably calm.

“Was it voluntary?” Anthony asks, bothered by the idea of someone being _made_ to do the sort of work that must go into managing the Core.  The word ‘slavery’ hovers on the edges of the conversation, waiting to pounce.

“He suggested it,” Reed answers absently, rubbing his chin and scratching something out.  “There’s a great deal we don’t know about Wade Wilson in his diverse incarnations, and it all started with the one who became Fidelis.  We’d tried a lot of things in making the Core, but nothing really worked _right_ , and then he looked at it and started telling us exactly what was broken, how to fix it, what it all meant…”

Diagrams, blueprints, theorems—all come rushing into Anthony’s mind briefly.  The process of the Core’s construction.  Its programming.  The baffling success of Wade Wilson as a system operator.  The sudden suggestion of computerization and integration.

“The timestream… _told_ him to do it?” he guesses.

Reed flicks away some file on his left, opens a new one.  “Perhaps, perhaps.  Hammer—One, I mean—had some interesting ideas about that, things that agreed with what the Analysts call your ‘wild conspiracy theories.’”

“They’re not that wild,” Anthony sulks, but he suspects Reed does not hear.

“Three always insisted his machine was perfect and should be able to operate with any installed intelligence, but I think we’ve shown by now that the timestream prefers a Wade at the reins.  We’d already been computerizing full consciousnesses for ten, twenty years by then, but none of those consciousnesses ever set to a task as monumental as timestream maintenance, and none of them worked at the same task for quite so long…we really didn’t know what to expect.”

Anthony pulls out his datapen and writes out a note about the neurological effects of prolonged timestream observation, makes a memo to run diagnostics on the longest-working Analysts.

Reed takes off his vize and drops it carelessly onto his console before turning to look at Anthony.  “I suppose we should have expected memory loss.  The regression was a surprise, however—one might have expected him to revert to a state similar to a Dumb Node, nothing but plain, technical speech and straightforward, unimaginative thinking.”

“And it doesn’t concern you that he’s hit this childlike state instead?”

Reed makes a puzzled face.  “Should it?  Network performance is up thirty percent from last century.  Nothing aberrant has happened, nothing particularly interesting aside from that little Civil War flub—but that’s on the Analysts, not the Sysadmin.  Four mentioned the boredom a few hundred years ago.  But Three is of the opinion—and the Netcon agrees—that if something is working right all on its own, we shouldn’t meddle.  That’s why we don’t tune segments of the timestream that are structurally sound.”

Anthony snorts.  “You know, stars often burn brightest right before they _blow up_.”

“Now _that_ would be interesting!” Reed laughs.  “Look, Six, you’re too young to know yet—the timestream doesn’t let Wades do things that are bad for overall stability.  They get antsy, uncomfortable.  Sometimes, they’ll simply refuse to do whatever-it-is.  If it were a problem, he would be upset.  If he were upset, there would be a noticeable change in his productivity.  If his productivity altered too much in one aspect or another, Four would hit the stability alarm.”

Anthony frowns.  He has never met Programmer 004, the third Head Programmer, and knows nothing about her aside from her gender and the fact that she performs data maintenance on the Keeper backups.  “Four?”

Reed blinks at him.  “Hope NC005-Prime,” he says.  “The first Hope.  I’ll admit, in the beginning we had no idea why he’d made her.  Even he could only say that she would be needed for something, and that she would have to know how to program.  But ever since then, just before any event that has a particularly nasty effect on the stability of a structure-critical bundle, the genetic fabrication facilities spit out a Hope.  We decide where to send them by phase-matching.”

An improved phase-matching algorithm presses in on Anthony, and he mutters a curse before dutifully writing it out.  Speaking with the older Programmers is an annoyingly halting process.  Most of the time, what they say drowns out the flow of data; but every few minutes, something triggers an insistent, almost painful idea.  If Anthony could get his answers from anyone else, he would.

“So that’s her job?” he asks, when the algorithm has left him alone.  “She’s here to monitor his productivity levels?”

Reed blinks owlishly.  “Four can see resonant dataflow.  Her ‘job,’ as you put it, is to repair and maintain computerized consciousnesses.  She speaks with the Sysadmin on a regular basis, monitoring the status of his personality.  You were the one who mentioned that personality is inextricably tied to true consciousness, weren’t you?  It’s quite right, of course—if his personality were to alter too much, then the way his consciousness processes the plethora of incoming timestream data would be affected.  Your concerns are valid, I’m sure, but completely unnecessary, Six, and I’d like to finish this process before the end of my shift.”

Anthony has been brushed off.  He may be vaguely offended.  It stuns his mind into blankness.

Slowly, he turns and leaves Reed’s workshop.

“Computer, locate Programmer 004.”

 _~Programmer 004 is in the isolation library of Sector 3, Level 7 of the Core Tower.  Proceed to the Sector 3 lift.~_

An idea for a navigational system for three-dimensional lifts sluggishly rears its head; he idly writes it out while he waits for the lift to drop half a mile to the deepest levels of the bunkered underground of the Tower.  He has never been to the restricted lower ten levels of the Tower before.

The curved wall ahead of him is plainly labeled ‘Sector 3, Level 7.’

 _~Turn right.  Proceed eight hundred feet to the nearest isolation library.~_

On the walk, he writes about moving walkways and a man named Jetson.  He presses the hand panel at the door and waits for confirmation.

 _~Ident verified.~_

The room is narrow and long, and the far wall is glassed to look out on the central shaft.  Along the left wall is a hover-step and fifteen rows of things that look like large dataplates.  It resembles the paper-medium bookshops in some timestream bundles.

“That’s rare,” says a red-haired woman, without turning away from her console.  “You haven’t bothered to drop by in at least five years, Two.”

“Uh, it’s Six, actually,” Anthony corrects.

She takes off her vize and turns her chair.  Programmer 004 looks ten years older than him, but he knows she is only about forty years younger than Reed.  Her green eyes are sharp and appraising, and she has frown lines at the corners of her mouth.  She looks him up and down, snorts.  “I thought you’d be taller.”

“Yeah, I get that sometimes.”

After a moment, she waves him closer.  “So you’re Anthony, the one he won’t stop talking about.”

“The Sysadmin?”

She nods.  “He was really quiet for a long time…listless, almost.  And then he met you.  Apparently, he’s a fan of your work.  I’m Hope, if you really care to know.”

“I’m worried about the memory loss and regression symptoms he’s showing.”

Hope watches him for a long time.  “And what is it you want from me, exactly?”

What is it he…?

Anthony is flabbergasted.  He does not actually know what he wants.  “I want to know—” he tries, but gives up.  Then he nods.  “I want to know.  Just…explain it all to me.  What you do, how his consciousness has managed to persist so long on a computerized timescale, how bad this regression is in terms of his continued existence.”

She grunts and stands.  “Come here.”

He obeys.

She leads him to the window and points down.  A few hundred feet below, he can see a rounded shell in the floor.  It has a circular opening at the top that makes it look like the lens of an eye, and through that pupil-like opening Anthony can see a million tiny points of dancing light.  “That’s him,” she says.  “Like all other Nodes, the Fidelis Core operates through photonic resonance.  Even with the transmission lag between him and the compound’s support systems, his processing speed holds steady between sixty-four and five hundred twelve quantum petahertz.  He could read the entire contents of the CDB in about thirty-one years, which is ten times faster than any other system could.  Every second is an eternity for him.  The only thing that keeps him from going insane is the fact that he has a voyeuristic streak a few light-years wide.  He _enjoys_ the meticulous observations the Nodes send him.  He’s compared it to television several times, in fact.”

“Tele-what?” Anthony asks, nonplussed.

She grins at him.  “A few thousand years before your time.  Nevermind.  Watching the way those trillions upon trillions of lives unfold fascinates him.  It connects him to the timestream on an almost spiritual level.  If things start to go wrong, it affects the way he acts.  When Analyst 043 missed the warning signs for the Civil War event a few years downstream, he started to get very moody and petulant.  He threw a tantrum when I asked to review some of his older memory sectors before we purged to the CDB, and I hit the stability alarm—and that’s when the Head Analyst on duty spotted the fact that three structure-critical bundles were already manifesting the war.”

“That’s amazing.”

Far below, the Core glints in strange, hypnotic patterns.

“So, as for what I do,” Hope goes on with a shrug.  “I babysit him.  I talk to him several times a day, to check on his mood and the status of his personality regression.”

“How bad is it?”

“Hmm,” she hums thoughtfully.  “When I first met him, he was like a cheerful version of the Savant.  A little foul-mouthed, a little short-tempered at times.  But he had a frivolous side to go with that pragmatic side.  He seemed like any thirty-something male of the times, and he stayed that way for maybe the first couple of centuries.  The memory loss came after we built the CDB; he always decided what data should stay and what should go, and he started with things like the knowledge of his organic lifespan.  And that was when the regression began.  It seems like the painful memories of growing up and growing older are an essential part of some personalities.”

“Naturally.”

She raises an eyebrow.  “Naturally?  You haven’t met many amnesiacs.  Some of them retain all their quirks, their habits, their speech patterns.  I’ve raised the matter with the DBA, but she insists it’s better this way.  Maybe he’s less likely to try to change things, less likely to fight the shape the timestream wants to make…  That’s the major temptation of the Network, you know:  the desire to ‘fix’ your past, to find or engineer a world that matches your fantasies.  He doesn’t mind telling the Savant and the Auditor to destroy happy worlds or good men, and he might if he still had those memories of his adult self.”

“It just seems so unfair to put that kind of burden on him, especially if it means he’s turning into a child.”

“I’ve read your theories, you know,” Hope says.  “And you’re right—Wades are special.  He volunteered for this for a reason.  Something in him told him it was what he should do, and that something was the timestream.  They’re so much a part of it that if you move them around, the timelines just absorb them, like they’d always been there.  Like a bead through honey.  Your bundle loses its Wade?  No problem.  We copy one from a neighboring bundle, and the history of your bundle hiccups for an instant while it changes to fit him.  Sometimes one or two people know the difference, but everyone else glosses right over it.  Do you have any idea how many times we’ve had to replace the MP bundle’s Wade?  The other occupants never even noticed.”

The suggestion that a whole series of people is interchangeable and expendable appalls Anthony.  “And that’s it?  They’re just…spackle for the cracks in the timestream?”

“You’re not _listening_ , Six,” Hope says sharply, and narrows her eyes at him.  “While the rest of us are knees and elbows and—and fucking _gall-bladders_ of the timestream, Wades are its fingers.  Yes, we’re necessary and helpful in an oblique way, but Wades are how it gets things done.  Sometimes they get a little beat-up—a papercut here, a minor burn there—but they get the job done, and they go right back to doing what they were doing.  It’s a little weird, and maybe a little sad, but as long as they don’t stop to think about it, they are _happy_ , so don’t fucking bring it to their attention.”

He scowls.  “It’s not right.  They deserve—”

“They deserve to think they’re happy,” she interrupts.  The look on her face is fierce; it reminds him of Stephanie when she is in the middle of one of her tirades about the failing sense of moral responsibility in today’s youth.  “Is believing that you’re happy different in any quantifiable way from actually _being_ happy?”

“Yes, because if you only believe it, the effect can be shattered by examination.”

“So don’t make them examine it,” she says again.

“They should know the truth.  They’d want that.”

She looks at him for a long time.  “The Savant knows the truth.  The next time he comes in for a backup, ask him if he appreciates that.  People say they want to know, but they _don’t_.  And if you take it into your stupid, self-righteous head to tell any of this to the Sysadmin, I’ll have you sent to the Null-res Facility before you can fucking _blink_ , assuming he doesn’t bring the whole fucking Network crashing down.”

“Wow,” Anthony says numbly.  “You are a _bitch_.”

“We’ll see if you’re still so fucking shiny and idealistic in another two thousand years,” she snorts.  “I still have six more Keepers to regrow.  Get out of my library, Six.  Go play with your pretty blonde fiancée while she lasts.”

He stomps out in an angry huff.  It is only halfway down the corridor that he realizes he never had a single invading idea while he was in the library with Hope.

 

 **.End.**


	6. Standards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Programmer 005 has been getting bad error messages. In a fit of temper, she interrupts Anthony's lunch date to complain about the way he writes code.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ladies and gents, Programmer 005.  shamelessly based on [~MerianMoriarty](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com).
> 
>  **warnings:**   Fateverse.  sci-fi/technobabble.  a little background Rule 63.  language: r (for c**k and excessive use of f***).
> 
>  **pairing:**   none/gen. background Steph/Tony.
> 
>  **timeline:**   maybe a day after **Regression** , at some restaurant near the Core compound.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   marvel owns all base characters, but i created the AU and various AU versions of the characters.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) the title is a reference to coding standards, guidelines that help all the programmers of a given company code in a similar enough fashion that they can pick up each other's work without worrying that something will mysteriously break.  2) One: Dr. Jack Hammer (Weasel); Two: Dr. Reed Richards; Three: Forge; Four: Hope; Five: Mizutaki Oshima; Six: Anthony Stark.  3) i imagine that the future at some point moved away from a monetary economy, but then picked it back up after interacting with other timelines for a while.  and there will always be people who prefer natural ingredients to stuff made by a nifty little food-replicator-thingy.  hence the existence of restaurants even in the shiny future.  4) when i first met her, Moriarty was like a tiny tornado.  she's a little less than five feet tall, under a hundred pounds, cusses like a sailor (in at least four languages that i know of), consumes sugar like a four-year-old, and hits like a prize-fighter.  5) in the future, people can not only translate what they hear in real-time, they can censor it.  Programmers are restricted from using anything that will interfere with what they read or hear, just in case it messes with their ability to code.  6) Moriarty's #2 pet peeve in programming:  bad error messages.  either make a table that explains what the code stands for, or make the error print out a helpful message like "infinite loop error" or "printer not found error."  7) Node 250 is Eight-ball, from [The Dreams of the Waking Man](http://archiveofourown.org/series/10104)
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Standards**

 

Anthony is trying to enjoy lunch with Stephanie.  He is still upset about the conversation he had with Four two days ago, and is also perplexed by the way either she or the isolation library had completely blocked the flow of ideas into his mind.  But he is trying.

Stephanie is talking about the Traveler, about whether the Network should keep him on as a Keeper or find a replacement and let him get back to his life.

Anthony cannot bring himself to pay much attention.  He thinks the Traveler would make an interesting Keeper, but the man does not seem to have the inclination.  He does not mention this; he has learned not to give Stephanie his opinion on a matter unless she specifically asks for it.  Unlike every other Steve he has met (despite a nearly even gender ratio, he cannot help thinking of them all as Steves, since the Cartographer was the first adult he ever met who took him seriously), she is remarkably unaccepting of his ideas, no matter how brilliant she claims to think him.

And then the peace of the afternoon is shattered by a stream of profanity growing steadily nearer and louder.

“—fucking bullshit oughtta be fucking shot, it’s seriously too fucking far to walk, but too close to take a fucking shuttle without feeling like a fucking lazy bitch—get the fuck outta my way, I’m a fucking _Programmer_ here on urgent mother-fucking business, to talk to that fucking inconsistent piece of schizo shit over there, thank you very fucking much—no, I don’t want anything to fucking drink, I’m here to fucking give that idiot asshat a piece of my fucking mind and get some fucking answers—”

Stephanie’s face falls into a very dry and unamused frown.  Stephanie does not approve of swearing, but nothing short of the presence of a young child and Jessica’s disapproving maternal scowl can clean up Five’s mouth.  Five’s everyday vocabulary is bad enough, but her angry vocabulary can and has crashed realtime censoring software.

So Stephanie copes by ignoring everything that leaves Five’s mouth and opting instead to hear second-hand versions of anything important.

Anthony grins.  “Five, what are you doing out in daylight?  I’m surprised you haven’t spontaneously combusted.”

The little woman shoves a food server out of the way (the man trips, but does not drop his tray) and stomps toward them like a ninety-pound tsunami.

“Six!” she yells.  “What the monkey-fuck is up with that fucking shit-ass code you wrote for fucking two-fifty, goddammit?  Have you ever fucking heard of whitespace or fucking _readability statistics_ , you fucking moron?  I’m getting back gank-fuck error messages that fucking look like they were fucking typed by fucking crackhead monkeys on fucking _acid_ with four fucking typewriters each—”

“What’s a typewriter?” Anthony wonders.  Diagrams and descriptions flutter into his head, and he traces them on the table, next to his salad dish.  “Oh.  Nevermind.”

“—fucking gobbledegook gibberish, and I can’t fucking make face or cock outta the damn stuff, and something is fucking borking its way to hell and back and fucking Four won’t fucking talk to anybody because she’s in some kind of pussy bitch-fit sulk and—”

“My error codes are all perfectly sensible and systematic,” Anthony tries.  His brain and hand defy him by writing out an improved error code system for Nodes.

“—wanted fucking jury-rigged, unmaintainable fucking pig-slop, they would’ve let the fucking Underprogrammers write it.  What the fucking fuck, Six.  Seriously.  What the fucking fuck.”

He waits to make sure she is finished.

Stephanie is making a terrible face, and Anthony hopes his mother was wrong, because he does not want Stephanie to stick that way.

Five takes a deep breath, lets it out in a satisfied sigh.  “Well?”

“I’m sorry, all I heard was beeeeep.”

“Don’t fucking try that shit, Six, it’s not as funny as you think it is and I must’ve heard it a million fucking times by age twenty.  We all know damn well Programmers aren’t allowed to use censoring software.”

“The gist, if I understand correctly, was that you wish we had coding standards.”

She scowls.  “That, too.  The problem’s in the new transmissions from two-fifty.”

That gets his attention.  “It’s transmitting again?  Already?”

“What fucking ‘already’?” Five huffs.  “That loop is smack-dab in the fucking middle of greb, and the Core’s been coiling like hell compared to WM.”

“And what’s wrong with the new transmissions?”

“The fucking query pattern is all off.  It looks nothing like the pattern it gave at first, and the query mutability is fucking _way_ wrong, even for a Smart Node.”  She shakes her head.  “Even comparing the patterns to the Savant’s, it’s just plain fucking _off_.  When I try to do diagnostics, I get your fucking shitty unhelpful error messages, and when I try to get Four to look at it, since she knows more about consciousnesses, I get her fucking ‘do not disturb, I am a crotchety emo hag granny from hell’ bullshit.  Speaking of which, what the _fuck_ bug did you stick in her panties?”

Anthony avoids the last question.  “Sorry, Steph, looks like we’ll have to take a rain check.  I need to have a look at a Node’s error codes in person.  Dinner tonight?”

The blonde smiles at him in understanding.  “Don’t worry about it, Tony.  Duty calls, and all that.  Yes, dinner would be swell.”

He sets his napkin on the table as he stands, pauses to kiss Stephanie’s cheek, and gestures for Five to lead the way back to the compound.

 

 **.End.**


	7. Gestalt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eight-ball is the most sophisticated AI Anthony has ever written. Now it seems that it's grown beyond its programming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they're not "bugs," they're "unexpected features."
> 
>  **warnings:**   Fateverse.  sci-fi/technobabble.  AI evolution, philosophical junk.  language: pg-13 (for f***, s***, and g**damn).
> 
>  **pairing:**   none/gen. reference to Nate/Wade bromance.
> 
>  **timeline:**   shortly after **Standards** , back at the Core compound.
> 
>  **disclaimer:**   marvel owns all base characters, but i created the AU and various AU versions of the characters.
> 
>  **notes:**   1) gestalt (guh-'shtahlt) is the German word for the curious phenomenon of things becoming more than the sum of their parts, sometimes through evolution-like processes.  2) the sector lifts are all in the middle of their respective tower sectors, and the libraries are all at the right-hand (when facing in) end of their respective sectors.  3) as Four mentioned in [Artifacts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/238745/chapters/366509), the data-patterns that make up an AI look very different from the data-patterns that make up a human consciousness.  4) it's been argued that a real conscience is the result of an extremely complicated set of mental and emotional priorities that is completely individual to each person and would be almost impossible to replicate in an artificial construct.  5) the **Fidelis Standardized Ethical Diagnostic** should have a nice, hefty entry in the Glossary and Appendix.  the three scenarios that Anthony poses to Eight-ball are all classical ethical problems; a version of the turtle-in-the-desert scenario even appears in the Voight-Kampff test in Bladerunner.  6) the problem with an AI developing a real conscience is that a simple priority list makes most AI more predictable than humans (which Stephanie mentioned back in **Knots** ).
> 
> visit [The Fateverse Glossary](http://merianmoriarty.deviantart.com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

**Gestalt**

 

“What are you gonna do when we get down there?” Five wants to know while they’re riding the lift.

Anthony shrugs.  “Hack us into the library.  If that doesn’t work, I’ll ask the Sysadmin to let us in.”

“That may be the dumbest joke I’ve heard in the past twenty years.”

“I’m not joking.”

Gradually, it occurs to him that her hands are shaking.

“Five?”

When she speaks again, her voice is tight and strained.  “Hey, look, I’m only gonna go along with this because I fucking hate it when people refuse to do their jobs and you technically outrank me and I can completely blame this on you if it goes south.  For the record, I’m not loving the idea of breaking into one of the old woman’s libraries.”

“Duly noted,” he says, just before the lift’s doors open.

 _~Turn right.  Proceed eight hundred feet to the nearest isolation library.~_

Five seems to have worked up her nerve; she stalks down the curving corridor with all the fury she mustered at lunch and aggressively palms the access panel of the library.

 _~Ingress denied,~_ the compound’s computer beeps.

Anthony already has his datapen ready, slips his way into the nearby systems with an easy scribble of code.  The door, however, refuses every backdoor authorization he can think of (he is pestered briefly by the mental image of a man in a suit saying, ‘Ah-ah-ah, I thought of that one, too…’).  He presses the messaging button on his datapen, hurriedly scrawls a brief note.

 _-Are you there?-_

The access panel flickers and blanks, and text appears.

 **define ‘there.’  XD**

Anthony rolls his eyes.  _-Ha ha.  Listen, we need to talk to Four, but she’s locked the library.  Could you work your magic and give us a Sysadmin override?-_

 **…dunno.  =S  if she’s being grumpy, maybe you should leave her alone.  she’s no fun when she’s grumpy anyway.**

 _-We need her to examine some data—it’s very important.  We need her to do her job, regardless of how pissed she is at me.-_

 **you made Hope mad?  D=  what did you do, you meanie?!**

“What?!” Anthony squawks.  “What’d _I_ do?  _She’s_ the one who—you know what, nevermind.  I’ll just go get a welding torch or something.”  As he turns to go, he hears the door chime.

 _~Access granted by System Administrator override.~_

“Thank you.”

“You traitor!” Four growls as the door opens.

“It’s not his fault you won’t do your goddamn job,” Five grits out.

Four seems surprised to see the other woman.  “Five?  _You’re_ the one who’s been trying to get in touch with me?  What is it?”

Anthony decides to answer by drawing up the form to request a full active imprint of Node 250.  “He’s a wily fucker,” he says while he finishes filling it out.  “So lock the plate as soon as you make the imprint.  Slot…DD85F3, I think.”

After a moment, a slot on the shelf blinks.

“Four?” Anthony says, gesturing to the wall.

The redhead glares at him for a moment, as though she could read his mind by force of will alone.  Then she goes to the shelf and slides the isolation plate out of the blinking port in the wall.  “Six, what in God’s name am I looking at?” she hisses, and her tone is some muddled mixture of fear and anger.  “What the _hell_ did you make?”

In her hand, the plate’s surface flickers with blasts of color that look like fireworks; they dance and meld and explode all over again.

Helpfully, Anthony gestures to it.  “Well, _that_ is an active imprint.”

“I know that!” she snaps.  “Tell me what it’s an imprint _of_ before I _hit you with it_.”

“You were there when I commissioned Node 250.”

Four makes a terrible face and clenches her hands around the iso plate, and he gets the feeling that she may actually be moments away from trying to jam it through his skull.  “I was, and _this_ looks nothing like it.  This looks almost like a _him_ , which should be impossible with the methods you used.  Load the cached active imprint of Keeper 056 into slot DD85F4.”

The next slot flashes, and she pulls the plate to hold them out side by side.  The second imprint looks a lot like the first, as far as Anthony can tell.

“Cool,” he says.

“That’s not ‘cool’!” yells Five, punching him in the arm.  “That’s a completely artificial construct evolving into a—a fucking gestalt consciousness analog!  ‘You can’t build sentient consciousness and give it intuition before you figure out how to give it a real conscience,’ _you’re_ the one who wrote that!”

“How do we know it— _he_ —doesn’t have a conscience?  To be perfectly honest, I didn’t actually know what the hell I was doing when I wrote that AI, so it’s kinda like somebody who’s never held a chisel suddenly getting divine inspiration to carve a bust of somebody with about five seconds of live video feed to use as reference.”

“That’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever fucking heard, you sheep-shit moronic monkey-fuck piece of—”

Anthony ducks away before she can hit him again, and holds up a finger.  “But—but the theory was sound, and I was definitely being guided by a higher power that seemed to know what it was doing, so if you ladies will just calm down, maybe we could have a look at him and see what the damage is.”

Scowling, Four slides the second iso plate back into the shelf and takes the first one over to the console.

As soon as the panel locks into the isolation console, its audio output comes to life.  _~Where am I?~_ it asks, in a voice chillingly like the Savant’s.  _~I was in the middle of some extremely high-precision solid-state tuning, send me back immediately.~_

“Yeah, that’s not gonna happen,” Anthony tells it.  “You’re not actually Node 250, you’re just an active imprint of its AI.”

 _~Then I’m somewhere in the Network Core, brought here for the purpose of diagnostic.  You’re wasting your time—I’m fully functional.~_

“How ‘bout we leave that to the fuckin’ experts, smart-ass,” says Five.

Four shakes her head and irritably snatches up the vize as she takes her place at the console.

Anthony looks around for somewhere to sit, but there is only the console, so he plops down on the floor and begins to fidget with his datapen.  “Four will be monitoring you while I give you some scenarios.  Respond as succinctly as you can, but feel free to relate your entire chain of reasoning afterward.  You may ask for clarification of any detail posed in the scenarios.”

 _~Curious.  Is this a matter of my ethical disposition?  Or of my moral disposition?~_

“Your tone suggests you believe the two to be mutually exclusive,” notes Anthony.  “That’s interesting all on its own.”

 _~Is it?~_

“Mm.  We’ll start with an easy one—the drowning spider scenario.  Everybody knows that one, right?”

 _~Do they?  And it’s an ‘easy one’?  Okay.~_

Five raises her eyebrows, jerks her head toward the console, and shrugs.

He waves a hand at her and pats the floor.  Four should not need any help, if Two was right about her unique abilities.

Rolling her eyes, Five sits down next to him.

“Assume you possess a functioning humanoid body.  You are alone in a room.  There is nothing in the room but a glass of water with a spider inside.  The spider is trying to escape the glass before she drowns, but her legs keep slipping on the wet surface of the glass.”

A truly unsophisticated AI might ask how the spider can be drowning when ‘nothing’ implies a lack of air.  Eight-ball, like all Smart Nodes with personality, should make the human assumption—humans assume their presence in the room implies the presence of air.

So Anthony waits for the inevitable question—‘ _what kind of spider_.’

 _~I put my finger in the glass for her to climb on.~_

Anthony frowns.  “What if she’s venomous?”

 _~Unless I hurt her, she’s got no reason to bite.  She’s more concerned with getting out of the water.~_

“You could have just tipped the glass over.”

 _~Yes.~_

Four flaps a hand for Anthony to continue.

“Spiders are easy—none of the ones we’ve met so far have anything approaching cognizant intelligence.  Let’s move on to the turtle-in-the-desert scenario.”

 _~And the intelligence of the imperiled non-sentient being makes a difference, does it?~_

“Yes,” Anthony says.  “It helps distinguish between empathy, sympathy, and compassion.”

 _~Interesting.  Go on.~_

“Still assuming you have a functional humanoid body.  You’re in the middle of a desert, with nothing in sight but sky, sand, and a single turtle lying on her back in the sun.  She struggles to turn onto her stomach, but she can’t.”

A typical AI would ask whether helping the turtle costs resources.

 _~I pick her up and take her with me.~_

Five punches Anthony’s arm again.  He wishes she would stop doing that, because she hits as hard as Stephanie, and she aims for the spot that bruises the worst.

Only certain people even consider the possibility of taking the turtle—the same ones who will put their hands into the glass to save the spider.  Most will just turn the turtle right-side-up and go on.

“Why take her with you?” Anthony asks, scribbling a note to himself.

 _~There’s nothing in sight.  The turtle’s weight won’t slow me down enough to make a difference, and left by herself she’d more than likely die even if I turn her right-side-up.  Why_ not _take her with me?~_

Anthony decides to skip to a nasty scenario.  “If you could cure every illness on the planet—acute, chronic, cancerous, whatever—by killing one innocent child, would you?”

An AI should say ‘yes.’  All of Anthony’s AIs, even the most sophisticated ones, should unquestioningly place the needs of the many over the needs of the few.  It is the only way he has found to reliably keep an AI from making the human mistake of hesitating at the wrong moment…the way the Traveler nearly did.  At the very worst, an AI would start to investigate the chronometric significance of the proposed sacrifice.

Saying ‘no’ is an indication of either conscience or faulty prioritization.

 _~No,~_ it says firmly.

Four frantically motions for Anthony to press the issue.

“No?  Are you sure?  I’m talking every disease known to man.  The cancer that took your body—”

 _~That’s nonsense; I’ve never had a body, and—~_

“—the cascading neurological failure that went with all the early brainslide experiments, that _killed Nathan_ because he wouldn’t give up until you had a _new_ body—”

 _~Stop it.  The scenario is unfair, it—~_

“—all that, just for one person, just _one_ measly person, who’ll never be _half_ the man Nathan was, and all you’d have to do is look the kid in the eye and know he’d never done anything bad to _anybody_ and just pull the trigger—”

 _~Stop!  You say you want to hear my reasoning, but you don’t give me time to make a case.~_

Four stands up very slowly and turns around with wide eyes.  Her hand shakes as she pulls the vize from her face and sets it back on the console.

Anthony nods.  “Okay, make your case.”

 _~The complexities of disease and human genetics are such that even if it_ were _possible to cure all human disease at once, there would be new disease within a millennium—within a century, if there were enough introductory vectors from outside sources.  What use is it to pay an innocent life for a hundred years of borrowed time?~_

“But don’t you remember what Nathan did with _ten_ years of borrowed time?”

 _~That’s not fair, trying to make me feel guilty so I’ll change my answer.  Even if I killed a hundred innocent people, it wouldn’t bring Nate back.~_

Anthony shakes his head.  “No, it wouldn’t.  But surely you realize that resonant tuning only ever gets us more borrowed time.  A day, a week, a year from now, overall stability will fall again, and the most exact way to fix that is by killing people—often _innocent_ people.”

The only sound for a long time is the whisper of three people breathing and the nearly-silent hiss of the air processors.

 _~What will you do, now that I’ve failed a scenario?~_

Anthony chuckles and stands up, brushing off his pants.  “Who says you failed?”

 _~…I don’t understand.  Explain.  The purpose of this diagnostic exercise was to examine my moral and/or ethical disposition, wasn’t it?  My fitness as an artificial construct presumably bound by the primary guidelines applied to all sentient Nodes of the Fidelis-473 Network?~_

“Yes and no,” Five says, watching Anthony.  “When he saw that you were responding based on assumptions most AI don’t make, he intentionally provoked an emotional response.  Under duress, a Node would capitulate to a human.  You didn’t.  Even under conditions of perceived ‘failure,’ you stood your ground…an indication of the presence of an actual moral compass.”

“It’s interesting, isn’t it?” Anthony finishes with a smug smile.  “You yourself admitted you’ve never had a body.  And the ‘you’ to whom I’m speaking right now is really just a _snapshot_ of the AI that resides in Node 250.  But you remember Nathan, don’t you?  You know you were never there, but you _remember_.”

 _~I don’t like it.~_

Four shakes her head.  “Neither does the proper owner of those memories.  And he wouldn’t appreciate the idea that the most private, personal parts of himself have been used to make a glorified calculator.”

 _~You don’t like me.  You think of me as a thing.  An imitation.  An insult.~_

“And much worse words,” Four confirms.

 _~Well,_ I _think_ you’re _a stuck-up bitch.  Fuck you, and fuck your goddamn high-and-mighty attit—~_

“Oops,” Four says insincerely as she pulls the isolation plate.  “Oh, sorry, I hate cutting Wades off mid-stream.”

Anthony rubs his hands together in gleeful anticipation.  “This is amazing.  This is _perfect_.  To think that he’s come so far as an evolving consciousness over such a short amount of—”

“The thing is an abomination,” Four grunts as she stalks to the shelf and shoves the plate back into its home slot.  “Purge slot DD85F3, authorization Programmer 004.”

 _~Confirmed,~_ says the system voice.

“How is instigating some sort of computerized gestalt consciousness different from the copy-and-paste job you said goes on all the time?” Anthony counters.  “I didn’t _force_ the gestalt.  And I didn’t take any of the Savant’s memories.  I just _looked_ at the data that made him up and started writing something—some several dozen things, actually—that thought the same way.  Eight-ball got the memories all on his own, probably through some really interesting properties of the resonant similarity of Wades.  And then he _grew a conscience_.”

The two women do not speak, and do not face him, so he goes on.

“You’re the one who runs the ethical diagnostics on the Keepers, so you must know how the Savant responded to all three of those scenarios—surely I can’t have been far off when I made Eight-ball.”

She clenches her fists.  “The responses were almost verbatim.  And when I brought up Nathan and said that the needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few, he called me a stuck-up bitch and said, ‘Fuck you, and fuck your goddamn high-and-mighty attitude, and fuck whoever raised you to be such a bitch.’”

Anthony spreads his hands.  “He’s a boldfaced example of all the timestream’s most intriguing properties.  The fact that his existence hasn’t adversely affected overall stability is pretty telling, too.”

“I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing, Six,” she mutters.

“Of course I do.  Mostly.  Pretty much.”

 

 **.End.**


End file.
